Lesson in school leadership from New Jersey

Lake County is not the only school district in America facing budget cuts. And it's probably not the only one considering raises for administrators whose salaries far outrank the size of the district and its students' academic performance.

However, districts that apply leadership, logic and common sense do exist in this country, and taxpayer money does not always have to be spent in a way that leaves people fuming.

Take, for example, the Lower Township School District in New Jersey, where Superintendent Joe Cirrinicione is taking a pay cut of more than $115,000 a year to help save the jobs of 32 employees.

The small district will have to absorb $2.1 million in state-aid cuts but is going to keep local property taxes at the same rate.

Numbers tell the tale

First, a bit about Lower Township versus Lake County, which are dramatically different in size but similar in other ways.

Some 54 percent of Lower Township's students qualify for free- and reduced-cost lunches. The figure is 45 percent for the Lake County Schools, which says that Lake is a slightly more affluent county.

Lower Township is having to reduce its general budget for the coming school year by 10.5 percent – from $29,041,133 to $25,977,937. Lake County likely will be in roughly the same shape percentage-wise.

Lake's general fund budget this year tops $296 million, and the Lake County property appraiser's office has warned that the district will get at least 10 percent less from property taxes in the coming year than it did this year. Local taxes make up 40 percent of the general fund, and much of the rest comes from the state. Legislators are still wrangling over how much schools will get.

In Lower Township, the superintendent of schools makes $160,000 annually, plus benefits, supervising the district of 1,912 students. Here, Superintendent Susan Moxley is paid $165,000 plus benefits for overseeing more than 42,000 students. Schools in the North typically are grouped in smaller districts rather than by county, which makes Florida's districts among the largest in the nation. And salaries are generally markedly higher in the Northern markets.

Moxley has said that she won't ask for a raise.

Giving back

Cirrinicione's plan?

Fire himself.

In a place that spent $15,000 per student versus Lake County's $7,200 per student, the superintendent choose to reduce his own salary rather than take something away from the kids.

He plans to return to work in November at $43,660 annually – the rate of pay for starting teachers in Lower Township – and no benefits. (Lake's starting teachers make just over $32,000.)

"We can save about $120,000 in salary and benefits by me cutting me," Cirrinicione told his elected board.

Bravo! I have not checked to see whether Cirrinicione has yet been hauled off in a straitjacket.

The superintendent didn't want publicity when he recently explained his plan. He said: "Everybody has to make this work. Everybody's got to do their little part.

"These are my people. I've made a nice living. Lower Township has been good to me. I think everybody's got to give a little back."

Pulling together

Members of the union covering teachers, bus drivers and food services workers in the little district just voted 183-0 to accept a new three-year contract with raises of 2 percent a year. That's modest for districts in the North, where pay boosts are usually higher. Under a new state law, the union members also will be contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries to pay for their benefits, so their raises for the next three years will amount to a slim .5 percent per year.

"With 32 jobs on the block, they all agreed to 2 percent for the next three years. They all live here and didn't want to see 32 jobs lost. They supported each other, and that makes me feel good that everybody pulled together," Cirrinicione told the local newspaper.

So, there you have it. Does Cirrinicione's wife have some high-dollar job? Does he want to run for Congress later? None of that matters. In a crisis, the superintendent stepped forward and demonstrated what needed to be done. He set a tone for how the district as an entity would handle the crisis and he got consensus from other employees. That's what leadership is all about. Heard any around here lately?

Should Cirrinicione get a nice fat raise when economic times turn around? You betcha.

Meanwhile, back in Lake County, readers who learned that the Lake district's administrators are paid in some cases $25,000 a year on average more than colleagues in a similar-sized district were dismayed. Lake's administrators rank in the 11th, 12th and 13th spots of 67 districts in the state, even though the size of the student population is 19th.

Pay for teacher aides, however, is 66th of 67.

What readers think

Reader reaction was overwhelmingly in the ‘horrified' category. Here is a sample:

Bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., justify their existence by demanding all manner of reports from the states. So, bureaucrats in Tallahassee have to fill out those reports. And, then in turn justify their existence by demanding even more reports from the counties.

Soon, the bureaucrats in the counties begin to believe that the school system is designed for reports, not for students. They think they are more important than anyone in the classroom.

There is always enough money for bureaucrats. When budget cuts come, teachers are the first to be cut. Why not assistant principals? Why not county office personnel?

I graduated from a high school that had 299 in the graduating class. Our "administration" consisted of a principal, a vice-principal, a part-time guidance counselor and two secretaries.

Can you imagine the uproar from bureaucrats if someone suggested that we cut administrators by 50 percent?

Remember, a politician or bureaucrat can always find enough money to pay for what he or she really wants.

What seems backward to me is that there seems to be a priority that Lake be competitive in terms of salaries to recruit and retain top-level administrators. Why is there not the same effort for teachers?

I think that taking care of the teachers should be a much higher priority.

Kimberly M. House

Leesburg

Here are a few more ways to look at the cost per student mentioned in your April 21 column.

Let's take a third-grade classroom and look at how much money will be spent to send those 20 eager students to school for 180 days this year.

You state the district spends $5,971 per student. Multiply by 20, and the cost for that classroom is $119,420 to educate these potential bright minds.

Now, out of these funds let's pay the single most important person responsible for their education: the teacher. One would like to think that the school system would be efficient enough to send half of the classroom's income the teacher's way. It doesn't. The average teacher's salary only accounts for 35.6% of the classroom's cost.

That's just another way of saying that the taxpayers spend $76,942 in overhead for every 20 students in our school system. Incredibly, this does not include the cost of the building.

I would like to think common sense would lead anyone to believe that this number is seriously out of whack.

Before the cry for more school taxes begins, can't the district focus instead on being more efficient?